The implications of the Appeal Court decision will go far beyond just Heathrow, perhaps to all high carbon developments
The Appeal Court ruled the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) illegal, because it had not properly taken into account the obligation by the UK to consider its impact on obligations to the Paris Agreement. The ANPS should have – through the Planning Bill 2008 that set out what an NPS should include – contained an “explanation of how the policy takes account of government policy relating to the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change.” It did not. The implications is the precedent set by the judgement on any large infrastructure project that requires an NPS. But it also goes wider. Many commentators have said this will require the UK government, and other governments, to take seriously their obligations to cut carbon emissions, through their Paris commitments. The court has shown that the Paris agreement has real teeth, and suggests that these targets must now be taken into account in all future big infrastructure projects, including plans for new roads (see below), airport expansion and the building of gas-fired power stations. The extent to which this applies to all planning applications, not just the largest (through the NPS/DCO process) will probably be determined in coming months, by the Courts.
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More on the implications: See also an important article by lawyers at Friends of the Earth, on what the ruling means, for aviation and beyond.
Ruling against Heathrow expansion – impacts and significance (28th Feb 2020)
https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/print/pdf/node/165
The Times view on the Court of Appeal’s rejection of Heathrow’s expansion plans: Lucky Escape
Boris Johnson won’t be the only one celebrating, but the judgement leaves the PM with two big headaches
Friday February 28 2020,
The Times Leading Article
Since the election Boris Johnson has made no secret of his desire to clip the wings of what he regards as over-mighty judges who overrule the decisions of elected politicians. But sometimes judges can have their uses.
Yesterday the Court of Appeal struck down the 2018 legislation that had given Heathrow preliminary planning permission to build a third runway and which had received overwhelming backing in parliament. In doing so the court has done the prime minister a huge favour. It has given him an opportunity effectively to kill off the 20-year campaign for a third runway, a runway that Mr Johnson once pledged to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop.
Indeed the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, wasted no time making clear that the government intends to seize this chance by confirming that it does not plan to appeal.
Of course it’s still possible that Heathrow can appeal to the Supreme Court, which is what it says it will do. But the reality is that it is unlikely to succeed on its own.
The Appeal Court ruled that the government’s Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) had failed to take proper account of Britain’s obligations under the Paris climate agreement. If the government accepts this verdict, then the only way that the third runway could go ahead is if ministers redraft the ANPS.
The aim would be to make it compatible with the Paris agreement, under which Britain committed to limit the rise in global temperatures to below 2C. The transport secretary at the time, Chris Grayling, (who else?) had concluded that this was unnecessary.
Mr Johnson will hardly be alone in celebrating the demise of a plan that would have allowed an extra 280,000 flights a year over London and the southeast. This newspaper has long argued that the near doubling of Heathrow’s capacity is not the answer to the capital’s creaking aviation infrastructure.
The project involved building the two biggest car parks in the world, the demolition of 750 homes and creating a tunnel for a busy section of the M25. Meanwhile Heathrow’s proposals to combat pollution, both air and noise, across densely populated and already polluted parts of London remained opaque.
Nonetheless the court’s ruling does leave the prime minister with two significant headaches.
The first – is what he should do to address the lack of airport capacity. As things stand, Heathrow is already full and Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are expected to be so by 2040. Plans exist to boost capacity at all of these, as they do for Birmingham, which, with the advent of HS2, will be 38 minutes by rail from central London. But all of these proposals have drawbacks and none can do the one thing that has consistently tipped the scales in Heathrow’s favour — provide the country with a global hub able to offer point-to-point connections to all the world’s population centres. Mr Johnson must decide whether that is still a goal for Britain or whether he is willing to concede European leadership in such connectivity to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.
The second headache – is that in rejecting the ANPS on environmental grounds, the court has shown that the Paris agreement has real teeth. Indeed, the binding nature of Britain’s environmental commitments has since been further underlined by the government’s decision to make the target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 legally binding. The ruling suggests that these targets must now be taken into account in all future big infrastructure projects, including plans for new roads, airport expansion and the building of gas-fired power stations. That in turn underlines the urgent need for the government to set out credible plans for how it intends to hit the net-zero target.
Easy gestures, such as last week’s decision to ban the sale of wood for household stoves, are not going to cut it.
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Various comments on the legal judgement:
The decision could have implications beyond Heathrow, as by citing climate change it had taken the rhetoric of reducing carbon emissions and “turned it into concrete case law”.
He said the decision had made reducing climate emissions “a priority for any major infrastructure project” in future.
Will Rundle, head of legal at environmental campaign group Friends Of The Earth, was pleased with that prospect, saying climate change should now be “at the heart of all planning decisions”.
He added: “It’s time for developers and public authorities to be held to account when it comes to the climate impact of their damaging developments.”
unlawful because it failed to take account of the Paris climate accord, under which the UK pledged to work to keep global temperature increases below 2C.
The original judgment was emphatic however that the Paris commitments had not been incorporated into UK law and therefore had no effect.
Overturning that position is a stunning triumph for environmental groups and a landmark moment for campaigners, regulators and developers.
Until now pledges to cut carbon emissions, including the government’s target of hitting net-zero by 2050, have been theoretical, more easily said than done. This judgement turns the rhetoric into concrete, practical case law.
The judgment does not rule out further expansion of UK airports, but it does offer an opportunity for the government to change tack, perhaps returning to plans for Gatwick.
Boris Johnson was always publicly opposed to Heathrow’s expansion, but any sense of triumph in the PM’s circle may prove pyrrhic. Any expansion of airports, wherever they are, will now be much harder to get off the ground.
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Will Rundle, head of legal at the environmental group, called the ruling “an absolutely ground-breaking result for climate justice. We were fighting a project that would have had dire implications for present and future generations.” He labelled the victory “one of the most important environmental law cases in this country for over a generation.”
The solicitor working on the appeal, Rowan Smith, solicitor in the environmental law team at law firm Leigh Day, added: “The Court of Appeal concluded that there was absolutely no legal means by which the Government could ignore its international climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement”.
Leo Murray, from the climate charity, Possible, called the legal ruling a “turning point in the climate struggle. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this decision. Heathrow airport is a bastion of the global fossil fuel economy, so the symbolism alone of this defeat will resonate loudly around the world, giving courage to the movement fighting for a liveable future – while striking fear in the hearts of the corporate fossil interests still determined to profit while the planet burns.”
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U.K. Court Blocks Heathrow Airport Expansion on Environmental Grounds
The Court of Appeal said the government failed to take its climate change commitments into account, a decision that carries global implications
By Benjamin Mueller and Mark Landler (New York Times)
Feb. 27, 2020
LONDON — Britain’s Court of Appeal issued a landmark ruling on Thursday that stymied plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport in London, declaring that the government illegally neglected its commitments to reduce carbon emissions and protect the planet from dangerously high temperatures.
The ruling, among the first in the world to measure a state’s infrastructure plans specifically against its promises under the Paris Agreement on climate change, threw the expansion of Heathrow into doubt and opened up a new frontier for legal challenges to major projects in Britain and around the world.
While the decision left the door open for Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, to reformulate the plans and try again, it set back the runway expansion considerably, prolonging a battle that has raged for years. That posed a dilemma to a country — a “truly global Britain,” in Mr. Johnson’s words — that is in the midst of severing its strong ties to Europe and looking for new trading partners farther afield.
But analysts said the ruling also relieved Mr. Johnson of having to oversee a project that he once opposed — so strongly, he once said, that he would lie down in front of bulldozers to stop it. And it halted one part of the government’s aviation expansion plans at a moment when any additional flights jeopardize Britain’s own legally binding target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
While the government said it would not appeal the ruling, the owners of Heathrow said on Thursday that they would.
Technically speaking, the ruling said only that the expansion plans — drawn up under Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May — needed to take into account Britain’s commitments to help reduce global warming, not that the plans definitely clashed with those vows. That left room for the government, if it wished, to make modifications to its case for the new runway.
The ruling was one of the first in the world to measure a state’s infrastructure plans against its promises under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
But with Mr. Johnson’s government already divided on the expansion plan, the ruling made it less likely that he would quickly press ahead, analysts said.
For the Paris accord — already under threat from President Trump, who pulled the United States out of the agreement last year — the ruling sent a strong signal about its potential to serve as a check on domestic policies related to energy and infrastructure. Rulings by British courts, while not binding elsewhere, can influence legal thinking in other jurisdictions.
“It’s not enough to take into account what you said you’d be doing under your own legislation,” said Jorge E. Viñuales, the Harold Samuel professor of law and environmental policy at the University of Cambridge, describing the message the ruling sent. “You suddenly have to take into account the declarations that states made under the Paris agreement, which is a completely new dimension that really bites.”
“It’s a very significant symbolic endorsement of the Paris agreement at a time when that’s really welcome,” he added, “because it’s navigating difficult waters.”
Buoyed by the victory, environmental campaigners in Britain were already thinking about other projects that could be modified or struck down on the same grounds: regional airport expansions, major railway projects. And legal experts said they expected the ruling to inspire cases in other countries, too.
“It opens up so many doors it’s almost hard to know which ones to choose,” said Tim Crosland, the director of Plan B, one of the groups that brought the challenge. “This is absolutely what the courts are for, to say, ‘Stop, this doesn’t make sense, governments are failing in their basic responsibilities to protect people.’”
The ruling is part of a string of recent successes for environmental campaigners. In December, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020.
“We’re now beginning to see the courts play a more active role, not just in implementing environmental law but in plugging gaps in some sense,” said Lavanya Rajamani, a professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford. “They’re being used very strategically, and it’s beginning to bear fruit.”
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson once claimed he opposed the creation of a third runway at Heathrow so strongly, he would lie down in front of bulldozers to stop it.
The Heathrow runway case hung on a decade-old British planning law (Planning Act 2008) that requires the government to take into account its climate policy in making infrastructure plans.
The government interpreted that to mean that it needed only to consider domestic British legislation related to climate change, not international commitments like the Paris Agreement. But the courts disagreed, saying that the Paris Agreement fell squarely within the boundaries of government climate policy.
“It is clear, therefore, that it was the Government’s expressly stated policy that it was committed to adhering to the Paris Agreement to limit the rise in global temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” the ruling said. But, the decision said, the secretary of state for transport “did not take the Paris Agreement into account at all. On the contrary, as we understand it, he consciously chose — on advice — not to take it into account.”
Pressure for more runway space at British airports has bedevilled governments for decades. Heathrow, a major hub for global travel that handles 80 million passengers a year, argued that it needed the extra runway to avoid being overtaken by other large European airports, including Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Schiphol in Amsterdam and Frankfurt in Germany.
The $18 billion runway project would enable about 700 more planes a day to use Heathrow, but it would drive up the airport’s carbon dioxide emissions, not to speak of the extra noise.
Business groups bemoaned the court’s decision on Thursday, saying that companies were at risk of losing access to trading markets around the world.
“There has never been a more important time to demonstrate that Britain is open for business,” said Adam Marshall, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, alluding to Brexit. “The government must back Heathrow expansion unequivocally and take all necessary steps to finally move the project forward.”
But for Mr. Johnson, whose parliamentary constituency encompasses towns and villages that are near the airport, which is about 14 miles west of Central London, the decision may have come as something of a reprieve.
He has avoided taking strong public stands on the expansion plans in recent years; in 2018, when Parliament backed the plan in a vote, Mr. Johnson absented himself by traveling to Afghanistan in his role as foreign secretary.
Still, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, the ruling only deferred a decision on a matter that has vexed Britain’s main political parties. The Labour Party government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown first gave the project a green light in 2009. His Conservative successor, David Cameron, reversed course, holding up the project. The Conservative government of Mrs. May resurrected the plan in 2015.
And now Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party, which publicly supports environmental protections even as its most pro-Brexit factions show some willingness to abandon them, now has to figure out its own approach.
“Giving up on having a major international hub airport would be a noble thing to do,” Mr. Travers said. “But it’s not, I suspect, going to be enough to convince the French or the Dutch not to continue with theirs, and the British government needs to think about all of this.”
Anna Joyce contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/europe/heathrow-airport-third-runway-uk.html
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New roads face Heathrow-style court action threat
By Roger Harrabin, BBC environment analyst
28.2.2020
Road building in previous decades was subject to less stringent environmental criteria
Plans for a £28.8bn roads programme could be challenged in the courts for breaching the UK’s laws on climate change.
The plans, due to be published next month, don’t take into account commitments on reducing emissions, the BBC has learned. They are likely to face legal challenges from environmentalists.
On Thursday, a court ruled that plans to expand Heathrow had failed to take climate policies into account.
The prime minister has promised many new roads, with infrastructure spending focused on northern England. But it is officials who make decisions over which roads are value for money and should go-ahead.
They are supposed to weigh the benefits of a proposed road – for example how much time drivers will save if it is built – against the drawbacks, including the potential for increased carbon emissions.
The current value-for-money assessment was done under guidelines last updated in April 2019, when the UK was planning to cut emissions by 80% by 2050. But two months later the target was raised, committing the UK to cutting almost 100% of emissions by the same date.
BBC News has learned that the guidelines haven’t yet been updated to take the tougher targets into account. The absence of up-to-date guidelines means some climate-damaging road schemes may get approved, when under the new climate laws they should be rejected.
A pressure group, Transport Action Network, says its investigations suggest some road schemes are going ahead, even if they’re shown to increase emissions, whilst other schemes don’t include any data on potential carbon emissions.
“The whole system desperately needs reviewing. The assessments were done in a pre-climate crisis era. They don’t take into account the UK’s commitment to Net Zero emissions,” said spokeswoman, Becca Lush.
The group is now considering legal action against the government.
The roads assessment is closely related to Thursday’s Appeal Court ruling over Heathrow.
Judges said the former transport secretary Chris Grayling should have taken into account the latest commitments on climate change before he granted permission for Heathrow to expand, throwing the project back into doubt.
Aviation is a notoriously polluting sector, but the debate about cars is less clear-cut. The government hopes technical innovation in the shape of electric and hydrogen cars will allow current or even increased levels of mobility to be carbon-free by 2050.
A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said: “We take our commitment to carbon targets immensely seriously and have one of the world’s most ambitious plans for reducing carbon emissions. We have developed our roads strategy alongside this.
“We’re also working hard to reduce the environmental impact of cars on our roads, with our ambitious plans to encourage the uptake of battery electric vehicles resulting in one sold every 15 minutes last year.”
However, critics doubt the clean car revolution will happen fast enough to prevent emissions breaching climate laws. They also warn about the environmental impact of the mining and manufacturing needed to make battery cars, and of the unavoidable particulate pollution generated by tyres and brakes.
The Treasury has been under pressure to deliver a huge infrastructure package to run alongside the Budget in March. Future road building is supposed to take the UK’s tougher commitments to the environment into account. A source said the assessment guidelines were constantly being upgraded but wouldn’t say whether they had accounted for the net zero target.
Josh Burke from the London School of Economics said if the government wasn’t keeping guidance up-to-date there was a risk of “locking in highly polluting forms of transport” which shouldn’t technically be going ahead.
Stephen Joseph, a visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire said: “It’s highly likely that the government will face further legal challenges if it goes ahead with road spending without having properly considered the implications for net zero climate emissions.”
Some authorities are already taking net zero emissions into account. The Welsh government recently scrapped a planned relief road round Newport, partly on environmental grounds. And North Somerset Council has halted the proposed expansion of Bristol Airport because it’s not compatible with net zero emissions.
Follow Roger on Twitter @rharrabin
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51665682
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Road and air plans at risk as Heathrow runway bid rejected
By Graeme Paton, Transport Correspondent,
and Ben Webster, Environment Editor,
and Steven Swinford, Deputy Political Editor (The Times)
February 28 2020
The ruling on Heathrow’s planned expansion could have implications for other large infrastructure projects
Dozens of airport, road and energy projects have been thrown into doubt after judges delivered a crushing blow to plans for a third runway at Heathrow over its impact on the environment.
The Court of Appeal ruled yesterday that the government’s policy on expanding the airport was unlawful because ministers had failed to take proper account of how it affected Britain’s climate commitments.
A refusal to properly consider the UN Paris agreement, which limits rises in global temperatures, when approving the third runway was “legally fatal”, the judges said.
The government said it would accept the ruling, striking a severe blow to plans for the runway.
Environmental groups and lawyers heralded the verdict as a milestone in the development of huge infrastructure projects, saying it had “wider implications for keeping climate change at the heart of all planning decisions”.
It could open the door to a series of challenges against plans for roads, the expansion of other airports, gas-fired power stations and coal mines on the grounds that they too are inconsistent with the legally binding climate change commitments.
The Heathrow decision could also have a big impact on plans for the budget next month, which is being billed in Whitehall as an infrastructure budget. The Conservatives are preparing to spend £100 billion over the next five years on building programmes.
Friends of the Earth said the ruling could lead to successful legal challenges on climate change grounds against plans to expand Gatwick, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Leeds Bradford, Southampton and Bournemouth airports.
It warned that big road projects could be challenged on the same grounds, including plans for a route between Oxford and Cambridge, the A303 Stonehenge tunnel and the Lower Thames Crossing, a 14-mile motorway and tunnel to the east of the Dartford Crossing that is the biggest scheme of its kind in decades.
It may even raise questions over HS2, which has been criticised over the damage it will cause to ancient woodland.
The ruling could also raise doubts over four gas-fired turbines at Drax power station in North Yorkshire that were approved by the government in October, overturning a decision by its planning inspectorate. A High Court challenge is being made.
The appeal court said yesterday that the government acted unlawfully in 2018 when it failed to take the Paris Agreement into account in drawing up the airports national policy statement — the legislation that in effect granted Heathrow outline planning permission.
The statement, backed in the Commons by four to one, should be withdrawn, the three judges insisted, although the court made no judgment on the merits of Heathrow expansion or whether a third runway could ultimately comply with environmental law.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said the government would not challenge the ruling. It will be subject to an appeal by Heathrow at the Supreme Court although lawyers speculated that it had little hope without government support. Mr Shapps said the government was committed to airport expansion, which is likely to include an extra 50,000 flights a year using Gatwick’s emergency runway.
Jonathan Church, a climate lawyer at Client Earth, said: “This sets a precedent . . . to consider the Paris Agreement. The government must start taking climate change into account when considering major projects.”
Al Watson, head of environment at the law firm Taylor Wessing, said the ruling was the first in the UK based on the Paris agreement. He added: “Delivering a third runway at Heathrow may well have gone, and for ever.”
Then the article looks at various projects that could be looking shaky at present, including airport expansion plans at Gatwick in particular, as well as Birmingham, Manchester, Stansted, and Luton.
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Here is the Times editorial
The Times view on the Court of Appeal’s rejection of Heathrow’s expansion plans: Lucky Escape
Boris Johnson won’t be the only one celebrating, but the judgement leaves the PM with two big headaches
Friday February 28 2020,
The Times Leading Article
Since the election Boris Johnson has made no secret of his desire to clip the wings of what he regards as over-mighty judges who overrule the decisions of elected politicians. But sometimes judges can have their uses.
Yesterday the Court of Appeal struck down the 2018 legislation that had given Heathrow preliminary planning permission to build a third runway and which had received overwhelming backing in parliament. In doing so the court has done the prime minister a huge favour. It has given him an opportunity effectively to kill off the 20-year campaign for a third runway, a runway that Mr Johnson once pledged to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop.
Indeed the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, wasted no time making clear that the government intends to seize this chance by confirming that it does not plan to appeal.
Of course it’s still possible that Heathrow can appeal to the Supreme Court, which is what it says it will do. But the reality is that it is unlikely to succeed on its own.
The Appeal Court ruled that the government’s Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) had failed to take proper account of Britain’s obligations under the Paris climate agreement. If the government accepts this verdict, then the only way that the third runway could go ahead is if ministers redraft the ANPS.
The aim would be to make it compatible with the Paris agreement, under which Britain committed to limit the rise in global temperatures to below 2C. The transport secretary at the time, Chris Grayling, (who else?) had concluded that this was unnecessary.
Mr Johnson will hardly be alone in celebrating the demise of a plan that would have allowed an extra 280,000 flights a year over London and the southeast. This newspaper has long argued that the near doubling of Heathrow’s capacity is not the answer to the capital’s creaking aviation infrastructure.
The project involved building the two biggest car parks in the world, the demolition of 750 homes and creating a tunnel for a busy section of the M25. Meanwhile Heathrow’s proposals to combat pollution, both air and noise, across densely populated and already polluted parts of London remained opaque.
Nonetheless the court’s ruling does leave the prime minister with two significant headaches.
The first – is what he should do to address the lack of airport capacity. As things stand, Heathrow is already full and Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are expected to be so by 2040. Plans exist to boost capacity at all of these, as they do for Birmingham, which, with the advent of HS2, will be 38 minutes by rail from central London. But all of these proposals have drawbacks and none can do the one thing that has consistently tipped the scales in Heathrow’s favour — provide the country with a global hub able to offer point-to-point connections to all the world’s population centres. Mr Johnson must decide whether that is still a goal for Britain or whether he is willing to concede European leadership in such connectivity to Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.
The second headache – is that in rejecting the ANPS on environmental grounds, the court has shown that the Paris agreement has real teeth. Indeed, the binding nature of Britain’s environmental commitments has since been further underlined by the government’s decision to make the target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 legally binding. The ruling suggests that these targets must now be taken into account in all future big infrastructure projects, including plans for new roads, airport expansion and the building of gas-fired power stations. That in turn underlines the urgent need for the government to set out credible plans for how it intends to hit the net-zero target.
Easy gestures, such as last week’s decision to ban the sale of wood for household stoves, are not going to cut it.
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Opinion – The FT
Time has run out for Heathrow expansion
Court of Appeal ruling brings into focus the UK’s net-zero pledge
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
27.2.2020
Whether or not to expand Heathrow, the west London airport that has been a lucrative draw for airlines since the second world war, has tantalised successive governments for decades. The go-ahead finally appeared set 18 months ago when British MPs decisively backed a new runway. They accepted the argument, put forward by Howard Davies’s commission on aviation in 2015, that the country badly needed more capacity and that Heathrow was the right place to build it. The wrangling seemed to be over.
Thursday’s Court of Appeal ruling that the government’s backing of the £14bn scheme was unlawful on environmental grounds has reopened the question. The decision is not just a setback for Heathrow’s backers. It also holds implications for future infrastructure projects: the government will have to consider such proposals in light of its climate pledges, or risk being open to legal challenge. It is a landmark moment, one that brings a much-needed dose of reality to Britain’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions to almost net zero by 2050.
The court decision was not about the merits of a third runway. It focused on whether the government had failed to take into account commitments made under the 2016 Paris agreement when assessing the expansion plans. The court ruled that the government’s airports national policy statement — the legislation that gives Heathrow outline planning consent for a third runway and which MPs backed in 2018 — was unlawful. Ministers have said they will not appeal against the decision, although the airport will do so. The government should now go further and end the debate once and for all.
Proposals for a third runway have been on the drawing board since 2003. The then Labour government’s white paper recommended building two additional runways in south-east England, one of them at Britain’s busiest airport. Since then, the issue has been the subject of several commissions, as well as numerous reports and white papers. Arguments in favour have focused on the need to expand aviation capacity. Plans for a new runway were intended to allow Heathrow to handle 740,000 flights a year by 2050 — up from 473,000 in 2019 — and eventually be able to accommodate 130m passengers annually.
Business leaders have strongly backed the scheme, too, arguing that Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit idea of a “Global Britain” would be meaningless without Heathrow expansion. These were — and remain — key factors to consider as part of the government’s ambitions to boost UK infrastructure. This publication has previously supported plans for a third runway.
But the broader context has altered significantly. In the past 12 months there has been a marked change in the tone of the climate change discussion. Last June’s 2050 pledge by Theresa May’s government — the strictest target in the G20 — set Britain on a radical new course. Aviation is responsible for 6 per cent of the UK’s emissions. The Committee on Climate Change, the government’s independent advisory body, has said growth in the demand for flights must be curbed if Britain is to hit its net zero pledge. Other factors, too, are relevant, including the disruption such a project would create close to the crowded capital.
It would be convenient for Mr Johnson, who has been a well-known opponent of a third runway, to accept the ruling as an easy way out. But to do so would also demonstrate real commitment by the government as it prepares to host November’s critical climate summit in Glasgow and inspire other nations to follow the net zero pledge.
https://www.ft.com/content/af6bc466-5960-11ea-abe5-8e03987b7b20?
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Opinion – The GuardianHeathrow airport
The Guardian view on a defeat for Heathrow’s third runway: a welcome precedent
Editorial
A court ruling that airport expansion plans are illegal could be the shock that the system needs
Thu 27 Feb 2020
‘Given Boris Johnson’s earlier opposition to Heathrow expansion, it is possible, if not yet certain, that he will take the opportunity offered by this week’s court ruling to abandon the third runway once and for all.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
It’s not often that climate activists get to punch the air. News about the environment is alarming far more frequently than it is cheering. So campaigners were understandably jubilant on Thursday when the court of appeal issued its surprise ruling that the government’s plans to build a third runway at Heathrow are illegal.
Not only does the ruling make it increasingly unlikely that the controversial project, approved by the House of Commons in June 2018, will go ahead (Heathrow has said it will appeal, while the government has said it will not). The judges set an extraordinary precedent. This is because they made their ruling on grounds that the policy of expanding the airport is incompatible with commitments made by the government in the Paris climate agreement. While the law says that national policy must take account of the UK’s climate commitments, the 2018 airport statement didn’t.
The ramifications reach beyond these shores. The case brought by the legal charity Plan B, and others including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the mayor of London, has shown that with the right legislation in place, international climate agreements can have a direct bearing on domestic decision-making. But the biggest impact will be in the UK, where it has already given a boost to activists despondent at the government’s lack of preparedness for Cop26, the hugely important round of UN climate negotiations it will host in November. Given Boris Johnson’s earlier opposition to Heathrow expansion, it is possible, if not yet certain, that he will take the opportunity offered by this week’s court ruling to abandon the third runway once and for all.
Beyond the immediate significance of Heathrow, particularly to the west London residents who have consistently opposed it, the judgment highlights a deeper tension between economic development and climate policymaking. We are in a climate emergency. This legal ruling shows that under the law, ministers cannot default – when it suits them – to business as usual. As Lord Deben, the chair of the advisory Committee on Climate Change, put it: “The fact is, it is the law that we have to keep our emissions down.”
There is probably no area in which economic and environmental imperatives are harder to reconcile than aviation. Currently responsible for around 2% of global emissions, its share is predicted to grow fast. Aviation emissions rose by 32% between 2013 and 2018, and in the UK are expected to overtake all other sources by 2050. While new batteries, sustainable fuels and new engine technology are all anticipated, the prospect of anything approaching “green” flying remains remote.
That’s why the government’s official advice is that aviation should be allowed to buck the trend of decarbonisation, and to grow by up to 25% between now and 2050. But even if this is accepted – despite the risks – ministers must address the question of where this growth will take place, while working to reduce demand via new charges such as a frequent-flyer levy. While there is spare capacity in some places, airports from Aberdeen to Southampton have plans to expand passenger numbers by 59%, far beyond the official guidance. Such plans are not compatible with the UK’s climate goals.
Britain needs a national aviation plan to weigh the demands of different regions against each other. But nowhere must boosting air traffic be viewed as a shortcut to prosperity. In an era of climate breakdown, there is really no option other than to seek alternative routes to success.
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